I’m not advocating for censoring anyone. I’m interested in complicity with racism in the EA community.
Effective_Altruism_Person
Karma: −240
Not to be rude, but what context do you recommend would help for interpreting the statement, “I like both basic income guarantees and eugenics,” or describing requiring poor people to be sterilized to receive basic income as “probably better than what we have right now?” Because those seem fairly clear.
I think that a lot of these comments are subtle is what makes them so concerning. If I ran a cooking blog where I talked about cooking 95% of the time, and 5% of the time talked about eugenics, the cooking community would be justified in being deeply concerned about associating with me. What’s concerning is precisely that a large portion of our community finds a blog that unflinchingly endorses something like eugenics compelling. Analysis is never without values, and SSC has been explicit in its values at many points, as cited above.
Do you find it frightening that in defending the blog, people who associate with a community that wants the world to be better openly threatened journalists? Or that we overlap with a community that has endorsed neo-Nazi slogans like the 14 words?
I think that when you and I read the above quotes, we take away something very different, which suggests that we are looking at this through very different lenses.
I don’t think it’s productive to litigate this further. Ultimately, I’m very uncomfortable that EA has so much overlap with a community that openly threatened journalists online, that harbors white supremacists in its forums, or that openly engages with ideas promoted by white supremacists without discussing the historical context or use of those ideas. Regardless of whether or not Scott Alexander himself is a white supremacist (and I’m sure he doesn’t identify as one, though I don’t really consider that to be a relevant criterion), there has been enough white supremacist activity in forums he moderates to be very concerned.
I’m interested above all in EA evaluating its own biases, comfort with white supremacy, and complicity in racism. I think doing these things will help EA be a stronger and better community.
Just a note—engaging with these comments for me has been extremely emotionally draining, so I’m not going to be engaging with this post further.